Shaping the future: Our strategy for research and innovation in humanitarian response.
In a recent study for the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, we explored the challenges humanitarian innovations face in achieving scale. Our research highlights why this issue matters, its implications, and its underlying causes.
Central to our study were in-depth interviews with 23 practitioners – including innovators, innovation supporters, experts, and representatives from organisations adopting innovation – along with workshops and extensive desktop research. When we asked people what “scale” means, it was clear that humanitarian scale is not as simple a concept as it might be in other settings.
In a humanitarian context, “scaling” isn’t just about larger deployment or the provision of a greater number of ‘things’. Practitioners saw a successfully scaled innovation as needing to create meaningful value for the innovation’s users relative to their priority problems, to have done so in a way that those users feel as legitimate and in a way which could be sustained over time.
Importantly, scale was understood as relative to the size of the problem the innovation aspires to address. Asking ‘how accessible is the solution to most people who experience the problem?’ is one way of viewing scale. A humanitarian solution that systematically excludes specific groups, the most vulnerable or the hardest to reach, doesn’t seem to qualify as having scaled. Therefore, interpreting what is or isn’t scale needs a nuanced and contextually based understanding.
Some practitioners took a more strategic view of scale and perceived an innovation that has scaled or that has scaling potential as being one that can cross boundaries – moving beyond one organisation or region or country. This perspective sees scale not as an achievement but as a property – one which describes the ease with which new users can or will choose to adopt it (or even adapt it) – and suggests that scalability should be built into the design and testing of innovations from the onset if they’re to have a broader impact.
Overall, our findings suggest that practitioners viewed innovation as essential if the humanitarian system is to change and adapt. Change is seen as critical in response to the evolving nature of humanitarian needs, to the rapidly shifting and increasingly interlinked and complex global context, to new technologies and to a fundamentally changed understanding of what constitutes an effective and ethical humanitarian system. The overwhelming sense from the study was that the scale of current innovation, whether at the local scale or at the scale of the global humanitarian system, is not keeping pace with the scale of change needed – or possible.
In response, our study identifies a series of interlinked changes that the humanitarian system could feasibly make to improve its capability for responsive innovation. Each individual change may not be particularly effective on its own, but collectively, they have greater potential.
The first step is developing mechanisms for setting innovation priorities that are far more attuned to the voices of people who experience crisis and to those who work most closely with them. Supporting contextually based innovators, especially those who experience crises themselves, should be the norm of the sector, and innovation support capability should be increasingly embedded in local networks and institutions. Innovation support should be embedded in local networks, and innovators need consistent backing throughout their scaling journey. This requires a shift from a stop/stat, project-based funding models to sustained, purposeful investment. We also need to address “risk-dumping” practices, where innovators bear the brunt of unmanageable risks due to imbalanced funding structures.
Achieving these changes will likely require much more diverse coalitions of innovation funders and investors, increasingly finding ways to bring new resources, perspectives, priorities and experience to the table. Arguably, the most crucial change is the need to better support the well-being of innovators. At present, many who strive to bring about change end up as collateral damage of a system that is resistant to change. If innovators are the agents of change that the system needs, then we must provide them with the care they deserve. We found that many leave their roles, a significant loss to the sector, due to the high personal costs.
Additionally, large institutions in the sector often have incentives to maintain the status quo, which slows meaningful change.
Humanitarian leaders need to be bolder, willing to give up power to allow others to lead meaningful change. Leaders need to re-evaluate their roles, shifting away from protecting and growing their own institutions as their primary responsibility to one which prioritises the effectiveness of the sector as a whole. At the same time, the humanitarian innovation support sector should also be braver, investing more in governance and leadership innovations that centre those affected by crisis and in capability that creates meaningful ‘competition’ for the current incumbents.
Our study uncovered more challenges and proposed more recommendations for change than can be covered in this blog. While many of these recommendations are not new, their effectiveness relies on a collaborative and strategic approach. They cannot be left to be applied piecemeal or all at once. What is needed is a collective, joined-up response – a process to which the study aims to contribute. What we hope is that reading the study will contribute not just to re-recognising an already known problem, but also to a collective, joined up response.
“Humanitarian leaders need to be bolder, willing to give up power to allow others to lead meaningful change. Leaders need to re-evaluate their roles, shifting away from protecting and growing their own institutions as their primary responsibility to one which prioritises the effectiveness of the sector as a whole.”
Humanitarian procurement: challenges and opportunities in the adoption of WASH production innovations
This paper focuses on the demand side for product innovations and the connection between supply and demand, namely procurement. It is based on a review of humanitarian agencies’ catalogues, databases and process documents, supplemented by 31 interviews with humanitarian WASH practitioners, innovators, third party suppliers and manufacturers.
Impact evidence and beyond: Using evidence to drive adoption of humanitarian innovations
Innovation literature and practice show time and time again that it is difficult to scale innovations. Even when an innovation is demonstrably impactful, better than the existing solution and good value for money, it does not automatically get adopted or used in mainstream humanitarian programming. This learning paper provides guidance to humanitarian innovators on how to use evidence to enable and drive adoption of innovation.
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